PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.

Learn how you can build APIs by integrating the Lua and C programming languages. These APIs can be used to speed up development within your company, allow people to customize your app or game, and serve as the foundation of a domain-specific language within a platform you’re developing.

Author Tyler Neylon—a game designer with a PhD in applied math—shows you how C and Lua interface with each other, so you can create a set of Lua classes and functions that work programmatically with local applications. You’ll also learn how to guard against shady scripts written by users who either make mistakes or purposefully attempt to break your system.